My love letter to Gaviotas

In the "Iron Denominator" posts, I've mainly been dealing with energy supplies, and how we can cope with the coming age of expensive energy. However, as I've mentioned before, the Iron Denominator applies to the world, and not just energy. Food, Water, Housing, Information, everything is subject to the laws of division. How much is divided, and how fairly it is divided, has always been an issue for human society. In a world that will soon have a bakers dozen of nuclear powers, however, this question is a little more pressing.

I posted a link to Jared Diamond's op-ed piece in the Times a few days back. Having flipped through his book a bit, I can say only that he gives a lot of time to the issue of water sustainability. With his usual dry style, he captions a picture of flooded dutch homes with the words "An example of unsuccessful water management." Many people are aware that clean fresh water is an exceedingly scarce resource, but not so many people are aware of the myriad ways we use fresh water - for example, in the oil industry. Moreover, most of this water - which is so very precious for all life, not just ours - is simply wasted when used by westerners. I'll admit up front this isn't something I'm innocent of, but I just like long showers too damn much.

This waste hangs aroung our necks like a millstone. Many if not all of our policy challenges regarding the environment stem from the fact that most of what we "use" is in fact wasted. Our houses are perfect examples of this. Most older homes use roughly 10 kilowatts four four people. Even with the cheap solar panels I mentioned here, equipping this home to power itself would be prohibitively expensive. However, newer designs and proper insulation and windows can reduce that load from 10 to 1 kilowatt. Even with the need to store nighttime power, this could be done with an expense that would not significantly increase the mortgage payments on our theoretical energy-autonomous home. Any mortgage increases would be at least partially offset by energy savings. Outside of the solar panels themselves, all the necessary techniques and materials exist today (some have simply been forgotten for a long time - the Romans used to build very energy efficient homes) and can build homes at equal costs to comparable, more energy-intense homes.

(Bucky Fuller note: It used to drive Bucky mad that architects didn't know how much the buildings they designed weighed. They weren't giving any thought to the amounts or types of materials that they were designing.)

It's not just houses, and it's not just energy we need to be thinking about: Flushing perfectly good drinking water down the drain with all our shit and piss in a world where children die from dehydration could rightly be called psychopathic. At least one-half of all the gasoline we "use" is burned by cars sitting idle in traffic. We pay farmers to let good farmland go idle. Meanwhile, we pay other farmers to use soil-killing fertilizers and pesticides. Over and over, our waste is like a Gordian Knot, except this one is tied around our necks.

So what is to be done? A possible answer comes from a village in Colombia called Gaviotas. I've mentioned this to many of my friends before, after reading a book about this remarkable group of pioneers. Basically, in the late 1960s a half-mad dreamer named Paolo Lugari led a bunch of engineers, architects and artists in to the Colombian outback with a dream of a sustainable community. Lugari had been inspired by books like The Limits to Growth and The Population Bomb, and became convinced that if we were going to survive, we were going to need to figure out new ways to live. In the Colombian context, this meant finding a way to live in the llanos, a savannah-like area of Colombia that, while large and relatively empty, is also poor agricultural land and thus unsettled - and considered unsettlable.

Now, some crank leading a bunch of pilgrims out to the South American outback might sound like a story destined to end with a pitcher of bad kool-aid. But Gaviotas is still there, in the middle of the war zone that is Colombia. Through war, depression, and more than one crisis, the Gavioteras have kept on inventing new ways to survive. To grow their own food, they invented a simple but incredibly efficient water-management scheme for hydroponic greenhouses. To get groundwater, they designed lightweight pumps out of PVC piping, and simple efficient windmills to power them. To purify the groundwater (and recycle their wastes) they built solar-powered distillers that could provide a family's needs for a day with only a few hours of direct sunlight. Even if you're not interested in the environmentalist ethic, the engineering ingenuity behing these developments had me hooked. Essentially, they managed to replicate all their life-support needs right there in the village.

More importantly, they learned how to make a living in the jungle without destroying it - quite the opposite. Gaviotas is now prospering by replanting the jungle, and has developed a sustainable industry by tapping the tree resins of the rainforest. Everywhere else in South America they're burning down the Rainforest as quick as they can. In Gaviotas, this little village is doing yeoman's work trying to build it back up. If you want an excellent read, do try and find the book I linked to up their - aside from anything else, it's a wonderful story.

So what does this have to do with us in Canada? After all, we're not Colombia, we don't have the same solar input they do. We can't do solar-powered everything. But this isn't the point. Lugari would kill to have Canada's money or resources. Like Iceland, another environmental pioneer, the Gavioteras weren't using solar power just because they were environmentalists - though they were and are - they use solar power because it's what's available.

Also, remember the original impetus for Lugari's crusade: finding ways to live in this world. I think it should be uncontroversial to say that most Canadians don't know how to live in this country - that is, the 90% of the country that isn't within a few hours of the US border. Lugari ventured off in to the outback to find his ideas. Is it so crazy to think that we might do the same? Canada is a huge country, and we live in almost none of it. We need to find new ways to live in this country of ours. Some of Gaviotas' ideas may work here, others certainly won't. But the spirit is what's important.

This post has already gone on too long, so I'm going to break it up here.